13 Things Donald Trump Was Right About

Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters.

Donald Trump spent most of the weekend saying awful things about Megyn Kelly, after the Fox News host had the temerity to question him at last Thursday’s debate about his history of saying awful things about other women. That shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise: Hurling insults at people who cross him is basically the entire point of Donald Trump.

But when he’s not saying bad things about Kelly, Hillary Clinton, Rosie O’Donnell, women more generally, black people, Mexicans, President Barack Obama, various members of the press, John McCain, or Mohawks, Trump also makes a lot of good points.

Here are 13 things Trump has been right about:

The invasion of Iraq: In 2003, he told the Dallas Morning-News that the Iraq War had been a “disaster” that “should not have been entered into.” “To lose all of those thousands and thousands of people, on our side and their side, I mean, you have Iraqi kids, not only our soldiers, walking around with no legs, no arms, no faces,” he said. “All for no reason. It is a disgrace.”

Katy Perry shouldn’t have married Russell Brand:

.@katyperry Katy, what the hell were you thinking when you married loser Russell Brand. There is a guy who has got nothing going, a waste!

Campaign finance: Although Trump bragged (falsely) about having cut checks to most of the Republican candidates with whom he shared the stage last week, he also made some smart points about the corrupting influence of campaign contributions. “I will tell you that our system is broken,” he said during the debate. “I give to many people. I give to everybody, when they call I give, and you know what? When I need something from them, two years, three years later, I call, they are there for me.”

Material excess: “While I can’t honestly say I need an eighty-foot living room, I get a kick out of having one,” he wrote in his most famous book, The Art of the Deal. Both of these statements sound pretty true.

The merits of his cologne, which is actually called “Success” and features notes of juniper, iced red currant, frozen ginger, vetiver, and tonka bean: Granted, you can’t buy it in stores anymore because no one bought it, but Success gets 4.5 stars on Amazon.com. User “Kim” writes:

My boyfriend LOVES this cologne. They used to sell it at Macy’s but it was discontinued and he was running low around Christmas time…when I told him it was discontinued he was sad that he would have to find another cologne now..but then I found it online here and I was so happy! And it was ALOT cheaper than I used to pay at Macy’s! ($62) and it was the big sized bottle like he wanted and it was perfect and he was so happy.

Dick Cheney: “He’s very, very angry and nasty,” Trump said in a 2011 review of Cheney’s book. “I didn’t like Cheney when he was a vice president. I don’t like him now. And I don’t like people that rat out everybody like he’s doing in the book. I’m sure it’ll be a bestseller, but isn’t it a shame? Here’s a guy that did a rotten job as vice president. Nobody liked him. Tremendous divisiveness. And he’s gonna be making a lot of money on the book. I won’t be reading it.”

The Drug War: In 1990, well before the political tides had shifted in favor of pot legalization, Trump was declaring the federal government’s mass-incarceration campaign a waste. “We’re losing badly the war on drugs. You have to legalize drugs to win that war. You have to take the profit away from these drug czars.”

RedState’s Erick Erickson, who disinvited Trump from the conservative site’s confab last weekend due to his remarks about Megyn Kelly:

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and the wealthy wouldn’t fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation so we can keep on doing the type of journalism that 2018 demands.